In May this year the London Drugs Commission (LDC) published its report into the use, impact and policing of cannabis. It recommended decriminalising possession of small quantities of the drug for personal use. In a depressingly familiar response, the Home Office hastily dismissed the report – a twenty-five-year-old echo of New Labour rejecting similar proposals made in the 2000 Runciman Report.
It’s no surprise that the current Labour government, increasingly keen to throw human rights and civil liberties to the wind, would hold fast to a ‘law and order approach’ to drugs. But complacency in the face of bad drugs laws goes beyond Labour. With some exceptions – notably extraparliamentary radicals and anarchists – the UK left has largely followed the drugs status quo. Prohibition has become common sense.
Few policies have become so embedded in the public psyche while failing so spectacularly to deliver their stated aims: reducing the availability and use of drugs and related health problems. Prohibition has been socially, economically and environmentally catastrophic. And the heaviest costs – violent policing, health harms, and human -rights abuses – have fallen on working-class, black and brown communities, in the UK and abroad. We must replace prohibition with policies focused on reducing harms: the potential harms of drug use and the harms caused by enforcing prohibition.
Embedded racism
Our current legislative framework dates back to the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. Like US president Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’ declaration that same year, it was passed to meet the UK’s international obligations under the UN’s Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which was introduced in 1961. In both the UK and US, drugs legislation was also propelled by social panic around counterculture and civil rights movements and rising migration.
Indeed, as scholars have documented, prohibition laws are grounded in colonial-era racism. Study after study reveals that twenty-first century drug policing in England and Wales is still driven by racism. Today, prohibition in the capital is enforced by another institution rooted in colonial history: the Metropolitan Police. Notably, one key rationale for the LDC’s 2025 recommendation is to redress the disproportionate stop-and-search of black Londoners suspected of carrying cannabis.
Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rawley’s rationale for rejecting the LDC report is that officers need to police cannabis because drug dealing is linked to violence. His claims reflect a self-serving and widely held misunderstanding of the relationship between drugs and harm, namely that where drugs are sold and used there are harms to individuals and communities; therefore, the people who sell and use drugs are responsible for the harms.
But drug policy experts say that criminalising the sale and possession of drugs is the real root cause of long-term harm, especially for young people whose experience of schooling and future career prospects are damaged by early contact with police. As former undercover officer Neil Woods – now a prominent drug law reform advocate – asserts: arresting individual dealers brings more violence into the drug market without reducing supply.
When police patrol neighbourhoods, arresting people for dealing, possessing or using drugs – including alcohol – in public, they are not protecting communities or preventing serious crime. As per the historical mission of prohibition, they are enforcing social control.
The failure of politicians and police to reduce harms related to the drug market has led some community leaders to call for policy change. In London’s Finsbury Park, for example, the charity Minority Matters works with young people from migrant families who have been arrested and imprisoned for drug-related offenses. Founder Sadia Ali told the BBC, ‘The only way to safeguard children is for those who want to buy recreational drugs to have somewhere safe to buy it legally.’
Class A-C
Drug policy has always intersected with class as well as race. Historically, drug laws and their enforcement have been guided by the association of certain communities with certain substances, for example black Americans with crack cocaine and working-class white people with opiates. As Benjamin Y. Fong argues, while drugs used by ‘respectable’ classes are typically considered acceptable, those taken by ‘unrespectable’ classes are not.
This logic also works in reverse . The current campaign to legalise psychedelics, for example, is led by academics, philanthropists and entrepreneurs. It appeals to middle-class respectability in part by setting psychedelics apart from other drugs. While the aim of legal regulation of psychedelics is welcome, the campaign promotes what drug scientist Carl L. Hart calls ‘drug exceptionalism’, which reinforces stigma against people who use drugs like crack cocaine, methamphetamine and opioids.
Conversely, pointing the finger at the ‘middle-class cocaine user’ – bogeyman of right and left alike – is a cheap culture war gimmick that does nothing to end the harms associated with the international cocaine market. Politicians and activists serious about ending those harms, whether in Europe or Latin America, call for the legalisation of cocaine.
With some exceptions – notably extraparliamentary radicals and anarchists – the UK left has largely followed the drugs status quo
Public health advocates and users’ groups are also demanding legal regulation of cocaine and opioids in the face of a devastating overdose crisis fuelled by an unpredictable, toxic drug supply. North America is ground zero of this crisis, but the UK is affected too.
Scotland has the highest (illicit) drug-related death rate in Europe. There, communities have grown tired of waiting for compassion and action from Westminster. In January 2025, Glasgow opened the UK’s first Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF), the Thistle. Similar sites exist all over the world and have a proven record of saving lives.
While left-wing movements have been slow to prioritise harm reduction solutions to the overdose crisis, the right is all over them. In Glasgow, Reform has tried to ignite moral panic about drug paraphernalia around the Thistle. In the US, President Trump has capitalised on the tragedy of fentanyl-related deaths to push his carceral agenda. Canada, which until recently was leading the way on overdose prevention, faces a populist counterattack; safe supply programmes have been reversed and SDCFs (also known as Overdose Prevention Sites) shut down. Journalist Nora Loreto calls this backlash a ‘necrocapitalist craze’ because it leaves drug users most at risk of harm – those who are poor, and live and use on the streets – to die.
Health, safety and liberation
Prioritising those made most vulnerable by bad drug policy does not mean equating all drug use with harm. People use drugs for all sorts of reasons. For some, use grows out of trauma or social exclusion and can become problematic. But people also use drugs to pursue pleasure, relax, socialise, heal physically and emotionally, experience different bodily sensations and expand their consciousness.
Recent research shows that around 12 per cent of people who use illicit drugs develop problematic use. A progressive drug policy needs to prioritise the needs of those people while recognising the freedoms of adults to use drugs and ensuring they can do so as safely as possible. This means legally regulating all drugs.
Getting the LDC’s recommendations back on the agenda is a start. But cannabis is not a gateway drug to legal regulation. Several countries have legalised cannabis without legally regulating other drugs. In the UK, the 2018 rescheduling of cannabis for medicinal purposes explicitly excludes recreational use. Most importantly, legal regulation can only reduce drug-related harms as part of a wide-reaching programme of political reform aimed at reducing social and economic inequalities.
Campaigns against prohibition are being led by a growing international harm reduction movement and networks of people who use drugs, including many based in the Global South. A left committed to racial and class justice and international solidarity needs to be part of this movement – and put radical drug law reform on the political agenda.
